Category: Church Leadership

  • What does your ministry have to do with Dropbox?

    Did you catch that? Steve Jobs invited Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox, to his office to play Let’s Make a Deal. And Drew Houston walked away.

    Why? In the written interview for Forbes and the video above you get clued into Houston’s reasoning.

    • “He said we were a feature, not a product.” Apparently, Jobs was thinking that Dropbox would be a great feature… what is now iCloud. (Which is buggy and I’ve turned off, by the way.)
    • “We are excited about the prospect of building a really great and independent company.“

    Those two statements have great meaning if you understand how the tech industry works. In the tech ecosystem there are whales and minnows and only a few medium-sized fish in the middle. The whales go around and gobble up anything that looks tasty. If you are a minnow your goal, largely, is to get swallowed by a whale. Virtually no company survives a full life cycle from minnow start-up to medium-sized company to big great, independent company. The whales have too much money and too many lawyers. (see Patent Troll)

    While at first blush every tech start-up I’ve ever met will tell you that they are excited about their product line and would love to grow into a great company, the reality is that acquisition is probably their exit strategy. If you asked them, “Would you sell to Google?” Almost everyone will say yes because as they grow they realize a couple of things.

    • They are great entrepreneurs/inventors and not great managers of people.
    • They have a product and not a company. It might be their 4th product which hits and makes them a household name but they can’t see past the success of their first product.
    • They are starters and not sustainers. Their business model is short-sighted.
    • They want to cash out to get billions, bottles, and babes.

    What does this have to do with people in ministry?

    • If you want to build a great ministry you have to keep innovating. You can’t get so hung up on perfecting your first “product” that you stop innovating altogether and never find the thing that hits.
    • If you want to build a great ministry you have to be a great manager of people.
    • If you want to build a great ministry you have to sustain. Stop looking for a better job and make your job the best job you could ever get.
    • If you want to build a great ministry you better forget about billions, bottles, and babes.

  • Lessons from the Cloud

    I have a fundamental belief that the problems we experience in church leadership are technologically based. It’s not that we have the wrong mission or wrong people, it’s often that we are working on the wrong technologies. (Programs, agendas, projects)

    You might not see the connections between this presentation and your church. But the parallels are stunning. 

    • Just like at this company, there are lots of committees and their agendas at play.
    • Just like this company, we have legacy programs which are expensive to maintain.
    • Just like this company, there are people who work at your church doing things deemed mission critical that aren’t actually critical to the mission of the church.

    A grocery store company isn’t in the IT business any more than a church is in the building maintenance business. Contextualize that for your church. There are lots of things that each church does which are deemed mission critical but aren’t actually critical to the mission of the church.

    Yet, when we talk about foundational changes in the church, getting back to the core mission, there’s tons of fear internally. Fear is what stops all change. Fear is what stops all dreaming.

    Here’s what we learn from this talk that transfers right into the church.

    1. Different people buy into change for different reasons. The CFO wants to hear you’ll save money. The user wants to know you’re making their life better. Fiefdom owners want to know their fiefs are respected.
    2. End-users are wondering what’s taking you so long.
    3. The hardest shift is within the staff, it’s all about control.
    4. Continuous improvement is an expectation of the end user, even old people. And it changes the culture of the staff.
    5. Spend the time not on making changes but on change management. The changes themselves can happen quite quickly.
    6. Real-time collaboration is a better learning and leadership tool than presentations. (Though presentations still have a place.)
    7. Changing the focus back to our core mission helps the whole organization dream about new ways to live out the mission. Thousands of brains and hearts focused on the same thing is so much more powerful than a handful of leaders guiding the mission.

  • Bottlenecks

    A bottleneck is a phenomenon where the performance or capacity of an entire system is limited by a single or limited number of components or resources. The term bottleneck is taken from the ‘assets are water’ metaphor. As water is poured out of a bottle, the rate of outflow is limited by the width of the conduit of exit—that is, bottleneck. By increasing the width of the bottleneck one can increase the rate at which the water flows out of the neck at different frequencies. Such limiting components of a system are sometimes referred to as bottleneck points.

    Bottlenecks are one reason the church can’t grow to full capacity in the current model. It’s not that the Gospel of Jesus Christ isn’t appealing to more people. It’s that the mode with which the American church choses to operate is driven to a single bottleneck: The worship service. 

    With a clearly defined bottleneck and the low trust, high control primary management style of most in church leadership– we are seeing other negative non-monetary economic principles come into play.

    3 non-prescriptive solutions to finding church growth

    1. Embrace a high trust, low control management-style.
    2. Create additional entry points to biblical community. (Non-worship service endpoint)
    3. Capitalize on Americans culturally hard-coded draw to good news.

  • You can’t assume anything

  • To go deep, you have to go wide

    Photo by ??’ via Flickr (Creative Commons)

    I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how our students so quickly dispatch their faith in early adulthood.

    As I’ve read Sticky Faith, Almost Christian, Christians Smith’s research, and played host to the Extended Adolescence Symposium last week I’ve been taking it all in and trying to figure out “why.”

    Why is it that so many students walk away from their faith in early adulthood?

    And I can’t get away from this: The Jesus we present is often times shallow, weak, and boring. He’s easy to walk away from.

    It’s not that following Jesus is any of those things. It’s just that we present him that way.

    I think a lot of young adults walk away because we are shallow, weak, and boring.

    They are thinking deep thoughts about important things, they are reading Joyce and Emerson and wrestling with the Pythagorean theorem while we spend countless hours debating the merits of pop-culture Christianity. We care more about Rob Bell’s glasses than we do why Jesus is allowing hundreds of thousands of children to starve in the horn of Africa. We care more about next week’s worship set than we care about what’s happening on their campus.

    Our students are learning from their own experience that if you want to go deep on things you have to go wide– and they look at us and see us trying to go deep on things we aren’t very wide about.

    • They observe we only read from people we already agree with.
    • They observe we only listen to vantage points we are likely to already hold.
    • They observe we are only stretched intellectually unintentionally.
    • They observe we are avoid big theological questions.
    • They observe we seek training and education for our limited scope and see little value in getting outside of our discipline.

    I’m struck by the reality that most high school sophomore’s have a more mature reading pallete through their literature classes than the average pastor.

    A sophomore is reading Shakespeare, Hemmingway, Arthur Miller, Twain, F. Scott Fitzerald, Maya Angelo… to name a few. The average pastor is reading Francis Chan, a couple of commentaries from the same theological spectrum, and a book about leading small groups.

    You might have an MDiv but you’re looking pretty intellectually thin next to a 15 year old getting a C- in British Lit. 

    We make a mistake when we try to simplify the Gospel. We make a mistake when we try to dumb down what Jesus is saying to what we think our students can understand. We make a mistake of trying to neatly wrap up a Bible lesson into 3 easy-to-remember points.

    Because our students know life isn’t that easy. They expect an infinite God to be infinitely deep and infinitely wide. And what they see presented from their leaders lacks both.

    I think the thing I’m wrestling with is  the reality that students aren’t walking away from Jesus necessarily. They are walking away from the cheap, easy,uninteresting, anti-intellectual, shallow, weak Jesus we have presented them in high school.

  • Understanding Advent in 2 Minutes

    ht to Bob Carlton

  • Have you done your daily devotionals?

    The mantra of a daily devotional has been used as a holy guilt trip for as long as I can remember.

    Let’s examine this sacred cow.

    I think with a little examination we’ll get to the bottom of what we’re trying to accomplish while granting us the ability to re-imagine better ways to accomplish the same end goal without all of the weird, cultural baggage.

    Here’s what I’ve heard from students recently.

    “I’m a good Christian if I read a chapter of the Bible every day.”

    “I haven’t really read the Bible recently, but I learned a long time ago it’s easier to just lie about it and say I have. That’s all my parents want to hear.”

    “I try to read the Bible every day, but it doesn’t make any sense and seems kind of pointless.”

    “Yeah, I read the Bible every day. But I’m just kind of picking a random chapter from somewhere and reading it.”

    Unpacking the Daily Devo

    Because I’ve actually read the Bible several times I know that there is no command anywhere in Scripture to do an individual daily devotional. (Such as daily Bible reading or reading a commentary.) That very concept is completely a cultural creation bearing little historical context.

    • Jesus’ disciples did not begin each day by spreading out alone and spending 15-20 minutes reading God’s word and writing in a journal.
    • Even if there was high literacy among God’s people in the Bible, they had virtually no access to the written books we call the Bible today. It wasn’t really until the late 20th century that Christian families started to have a Bible for each individual in a home.
    • In preaching on this concept we (church leaders) often take things out of one cultural context and apply it to our own, the daily devotional concept is an excellent example of this. Yes, Jesus went on a mountain to pray. But none of the Gospels say this was a daily occurrence. Yes, many times Paul encourages believers to stay in the habit of meeting together, of regular prayer and fasting, but that doesn’t imply that this was something done daily nor was it a measurement of a persons worth.
    • We lump prayer, something the Bible obviously teaches and provides examples of, as part of a daily devo. But most often when we refer to “daily devo” we are really asking people if they’ve read the Bible.
    • The very concept of individual Bible reading is foreign to the people of the Bible. While they would have lived the Shema by talking about God’s word while going about their daily business, when they read or heard someone read from the Bible it was only while they were standing at the Temple or synagogue or attending some version of school.
    • If people were to “spend time in God’s word” daily, it was because they had memorized it. (Something our culture has little patience for.)

    If Protestants really want to dig into this phenomenon they need to understand it in context of the Reformation and not necessarily something the early church did. (There are lots of great books and commentaries about early church culture if you’d like to dig into this more, likewise there are many wonderful books about the Reformers.)

    Is reading the Word of God good? Absolutely. Is a daily devotional life a biblical command worthy of the holy guilt trip we lay on people? Not so much.

    Let’s understand that the very notion of “doing a daily devo” is a cultural creation. And let’s rethink that in light of what we are actually hoping to accomplish with the daily devo… a love of God’s Word.

    Passing on a love of the Bible guilt-free

    As I mentioned above from comments from students, we emphasize the daily devotional as a measuring device for spiritual well-being. Very quickly, students and adults learn that to be seen as spiritually mature they either need to actually do a daily, individual Bible study OR learn how to lie convincingly enough to make it appear that they do.

    That’s legalism at its finest, right?

    Instead… let’s think of ways to teach a love for God’s Word. And, as James says, not just a love of God’s word but a love for obeying and applying biblical principles into our lives.

    Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like someone who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But whoever looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues in it—not forgetting what they have heard, but doing it—they will be blessed in what they do.

    James 1:22-25

    What are some ways we can pass along a love for the Bible without defaulting to a method which (could) lead someone towards hypocrisy and/or legalism? 

    I can’t speak for you… but I know when I think about the adults, students, and even my own kids… I want to pass along a fervent, ravenous, sickeningly healthy, blood bond love for the Bible. (And the Christ it points to!)

    The question to wrestle with is: How do we do that? 

  • Are you having fun?

    Surely he took up our pain 
       and bore our suffering, 
    yet we considered him punished by God, 
       stricken by him, and afflicted. 
    But he was pierced for our transgressions, 
       he was crushed for our iniquities; 
    the punishment that brought us peace was on him, 
       and by his wounds we are healed. 
    We all, like sheep, have gone astray, 
       each of us has turned to our own way; 
    and the LORD has laid on him 
       the iniquity of us all.

    Isaiah 53 (excerpt)

    Here’s a newsflash friends. This is about Jesus and not you. 

    There are a lot of miserable ministry people right now. They strongly identify with Jesus as a suffering servant as they languish in a role they hate. They cringe when their boss talks to them. They quietly look for jobs all day at their current job.

    Sometimes these suffering servants even have a chip on their shoulder about it. As if their having a job they hate is something we’re supposed to be impressed by? 

    True, suffering is part of life. And some of us are called to suffering in life. But I don’t think a ministry job in the United States qualifies.

    Advice for people who hate their jobs

    Quit. If it isn’t fun anymore, quit. If you find yourself whining about budget or your salary or stuff that needs to be fixed but the leaders won’t fix it, quit. If you have day dreams of the day you get to walk into your bosses office and say, “Take this job and shove it!” Quit now.

    Quitting might seem insane. But it just might lead you to something fun.

    Don’t let Satan win.

    The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy; I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full.
    John 10:10

  • Extended adolescence & you

    Adolescence cannot last from 11 years old to 29 years old. Our society will crumble economically & socially under the pressure. 

    I think most people understand that intuitively. They reflect on their teenage years and their early twenties as a time of coming of age.

    But times have changed. Most sociologists believe adolescence stretches from the onset of puberty (11-12 years old) until the late 20s. In other words, the adolescence you and I knew is now 8-10 years LONGER than when we went through it just 20 years ago.

    When I think of people in their 20s I think of two distinct subsets.

    1. Those who move out and declare independence.
    2. Those who don’t.

    1. Declaration of Independence

    For some, moving out and declaring personal independence happens after high school when they join the military. Even though I’ve heard NCOs refer to their platoons as “their kids” certainly they are not dependent on their parents any more. They are earning their own way in the world, they provide their own housing, and they are trained in complex adults tasks. A 20 year old Army Specialist repairing a Blackhawk helicopter on a base in Germany is an adult role.

    For others, they go to college and pay their own way and handle all of the responsibilities of being a college student on their own. They reject the childish party life and are serious about their education from day 1. The young woman who watched our kids this summer was this way. She worked multiple jobs all summer to bridge the gap between student loans, grants, and her need. And she takes her studies seriously because she needs this degree to take her and her family a step closer to the American dream.

    Still others, high school ends with a thud and they enter young adulthood when their parents either kick them out or they move out. They discover adult responsibilities when they realize that they have to work or starve. Or they have to work or become homeless.

    2. Declaration of Co-Dependency

    I’m no psychologist. But over the past 10 years I’ve encountered dozens of parents whom exhibit co-dependent tendencies on their adult-aged children. They track their progress at school. They call them daily. They financially support so their college students don’t work. They either directly or indirectly tell their adult-aged children that they can always live at home, they will never have to support themselves. So they don’t. They lightly attend college and learn almost nothing. They party like Paris Hilton. They don’t even do their own laundry.

    Essentially, they are pets. They know it. And love it. They know their parents are co-dependent on them and they take full advantage.

    Most of these co-dependent parents have one thing in common: Disposable income. Their adult-aged children hang around with nearly no responsibility… because their parents can afford for them to do so. 

    Questions:

    • What role does responsibility play in extended adolescence?
    • If you serve in ministry, how do you help parents who exhibit co-dependent tendencies?
    • Do you agree with my premise that extended adolescence is tied to household economics?
    Want to learn more about this topic? Want to wrestle with this and what it has to do with adolescent faith formation? Join me at the Extended Adolescence Symposium on November 21st in Atlanta, Georgia.

     

  • The Solid Rock, The Sinking Sand

    What do I see happening in youth ministry? I think this song sums up the conversations I’ve had with youth workers of the last 2-3 years.

    On Christ the Solid Rock, I Stand
    All other ground is sinking sand
    All other ground is sinking sand

     Things that have always worked, successes that we could always predict, and stability we could always enjoy are all gone. Kaput. Poof. Vanished.

    And so I meet wonderful, wounded, hopeful people and all they can say is, “I’m holding on to Christ, my Rock. But I’m standing in sinking sand. What is going on?”

    Conversely— redemptively and mercifully— I run into ministries/individuals/organizations figuring it out and moving forward.

    Here’s four common threads I see gaining traction, whether articulated or unarticulated amongst these organizations finding success today.

    From transactional relationships to transformative community

    I don’t know how else to say it. But I think full-time, paid youth workers are at a disadvantage to their volunteering peers in many ways. Students are sophisticated, savvy, and motive-sensitive. It used to be that being a paid church staff member created instant trust. Now, for a multitude of reasons, being a pastor can be (though not always) a block for students. This was revealed to me in a conversation I had with a recent grad. She said, “There comes a point when you realize that outside of your parents every adult who ‘cares’ about me is paid to care about me.”

    People today are looking for long-term, transformative community. In a world where everything changes all the time we instinctively desire stability that is found in long-term community.

    From competitive to collaborative

    Individuals, organizations, and local ministries who are gaining traction are rejecting the competitive/high-power business-driven models and seeking collaborative relationships. This means anything from churches combining forces to create a community-wide youth ministry to youth ministry organizations putting aside their long-term differences for the sake of working together.

    There simply no place (or resources) for a competitive spirit when we are reaching so few people.

    From experts to innovators

    I don’t foresee us going back to a time when 1000s of people drooled over every word from an expert, writing notes furiously, and trying to wholesale implement their teachings.

    It seems almost silly to mention that this is the way it used to be. But this used to be the way it was! 

    Instead, I see people/organizations/ministries seeking inspiration from experts and contextualizing their learnings to innovate local solutions. Just like the Real Food Movement has people looking from national to local sources of food, youth workers are looking less at national experts and more towards local innovators.

    From sound bytes to application

    Isn’t it interesting that we have access to every bit of information we could ever want and yet we are reaching fewer people than ever in youth ministry?

    I’m not alone in this observation. People who are figuring it out and finding success are walking away from teaching styles which delivered “aha moments” and are focusing their attention on application. That’s not devaluing teaching the Bible. In fact, it’s refusing to just glance over the Bible without holding their ministries accountable for applying what God is teaching them.

    It’s no longer about pushing out the Gospel to whomever will listen. It’s about pulling people into the storyline of what God is doing and inviting them to accept their role.

    These are ways I’m seeing people find bedrock. What are ways you are seeing this?